"Of the Place".

In these testimonies recalling Edward Said--as a childhood friend (Hoda Guindi), an academic colleague (Michael Wood), an inspiring mentor (Andrew Rubin), a captivating role model (Ananya Jahanara Kabir), and a tender father (Najla Said)--different faces of his persona surface: the playful child in Cairo, the youthful professor in a panel, the concerned advisor at Columbia University, the activist inspiring his audience in Calcutta and Cambridge, and the loving and affectionate father in New York. These pithy statements by friends, close relatives, and admirers--belonging to four continents--speak intimately and astutely of Said's extraordinary presence.

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I would like to stress at the outset that what I am going to say is drawn from--probably--collective memories because the Saids and the Guindis (Edward's and my families have been friends for over sixty years--and through three generations: grandparents, parents and children, i.e. Edward and his sisters and us--through all the vicissitudes of life. Even death has not, and cannot, sever the bonds of friendship.

Elsewhere, (1) my sister has written a personal memoir of Edward's Out of Place and thus we share some of the same memories but have somewhat different interpretations!

I take Out of Place as my point of departure and one particular sentence from the Preface:

   Along with language, it is geography--especially in
   the displaced form of departures, arrivals, farewells,
   exile, nostalgia, homesickness, belonging, and travel
   itself--that is at the core of my memories of those
   early years. (2)

This struck an immediate chord in my memory; I suddenly realized that my first memory--perhaps "fictionally historical"--(as I was a mere tot!) of the relationship between the Saids and the Guindis, Edward and his two sisters and my sister and myself (there were further additions to both families later), were of departures and farewells, arrivals and welcomes. On this occasion, fortunately, the departure of the Saids at the time of El Alamein (1942) was followed, not long after, by an "arrival"--to us, a return.

In the first paragraph of his first chapter, Edward writes of his "overriding sensation ... of always being out of place." (3) Ironically, and perhaps paradoxically, my early memories of Edward are grounded on and rooted in places--for even that first departure is indelibly associated with a particular place--the lift and stairwell--in a particular building in a particular district of Cairo: Zamalek.

The Saids and the Guindis were friends and neighbors--we lived, respectively, on the fifth and second floors of the building-which meant that there was a continual toing and froing between flats. Whilst our parents visited each other decorously in the flats, we, with Edward as the ringleader, ran up and down the stairs with much clamor and clatter, much to the despair of our parents and the dismay of the other tenants. To my shame, now, the ancient (even then) and beautiful Art Deco lift was also subjected to thankless thumping during our illicit games.

The lift and landing of the building were the scene of yet another occasion which is fixed in my memory--as it added another dimension to the place of place in our lives and in literature. On that occasion, Edward and I met on the second floor landing as I was going up and he was coming down; I happened to have been carrying Eugene O'Neill's Desire under the Elms and Edward briefly commented on it, highlighting the human desire and greed for place. He, by then, had become, to the rest of us left behind drearily continuing our schooling, an object of romance and envy as he was being "educated abroad," a phrase oft repeated in hushed awestruck voices. He had already graduated from Princeton and was now on the path to fame--and hardship.

Earlier, Edward had already been the subject of much envious mutterings as he was the first, ostensibly because he was the eldest, to be given a room of his own! I realize now with hindsight, that this must have caused the first stirrings of feminism in the gaggle of girls who were, sometimes, vouchsafed, by Edward's lordly magnanimity, a glimpse of the room and even, on extremely rare occasions, the right to cross the threshold of the sacrosanct space and gasp at his books and, in pride of place, his piano. (Of course, we knew that it was because he was male that he had a room of his own!)

The Grotto Gardens--a place of mystery--(more prosaically known as the Fish Garden) was our haven across the street from our house; here we played, wrangled, and scrambled in and out of the cool dark grottos to the detriment of the artificial rocks and with total disregard of the fish. We had one special rock which we regarded as being almost as high as the Himalayas and which when we reached the pinnacle we crowed with triumph and glowed with achievement. On the rare occasions when Edward was with us he invariably arrived at the top long before us and danced and sang that most colonial of songs that we had learned at school: "I'm the king of the castle and you are the dirty rascals"! When, years later, "a propos of Out of Place we talked about the Grotto, and how he had always managed to "rule" us, he said to me: "You always were the rebellious one."

Edward continued to come to the old building in Zamalek, that had housed the two families and nurtured their friendship, every time he was in Cairo. Every time, in spite of the trials and tribulations--both individual and national, it was a most joyous occasion for all of us.

Edward's association with his erstwhile building came home very poignantly at the time of his death. Our current "bawab"--a young man who knew Edward only through his visits--came to pay his condolences to us, saying proudly: "One of the greatest Arab thinkers lived in this house"!

Edward Said's almost obsessive concern with belonging and not belonging, and, perhaps, his yearning to transcend place are evident by his quoting the "hauntingly beautiful lines" by Hugo of St. Victor--twice--once in "Reflections on Exile" (1984) and once in Culture and Imperialism (1993): "The man who finds his homeland sweet is still a tender beginner; he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land." (4) Edward's "overriding sensation" was being "out of place," but to us, if he were not "in place," he was overwhelmingly "of place"--and always will be.

Notes

(1) Nadia Gindi, "On the Margins of a Memoir: A Personal Reading of Said's Out of Place," Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics 20 (2000): 284-98.

(2) Edward W. Said, Out of Place: A Memoir (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), xiv.

(3) Edward W. Said, Out of Place, 3.

(4) Eward Said, "Reflections on Exile," Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 2000), 185; Culture and Imperialism (NY: Vintage, 1994), 407.